The combination of nothing-is-as-simple-as-it-seems and reduce-risk can only lead you to one conclusion: You have to design things before you implement them.
My publisher sent me a couple of new books today which might be of some interest to this crowd:
Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers who Lead Programmers
J. Hank Rainwater
The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World
Christopher Duncan
As promised (months ago!) I've completely revamped my list of recommended books. I've always wanted this to be a "programmers bookshelf" listing the books that I think every software developer should read. So I removed some books, good ones but not crucial ones, and I added a bunch of books, and came up with 19 must-read books (plus 2 books if you want to become a programmer). Visit the new Book Reviews page.
Three months after the original version, Fog Creek Software shipped a new version of CityDesk today, a free service pack release that fixes about 100 bugs and adds some spiffy new features that people were clamoring for. The biggest complaint about CityDesk was that it generated weird URL names (which actually surprised me, because most other content management systems do the same). So we fixed that. We added a few easy features that I think will go a long way. And we fixed all known bugs -- many of which we found out about because CityDesk catches most crashes and transmits crucial crash info to us.
Sydney Morning Herald: "Countless managers of small to medium sites have wondered how to cross the chasm from hand-built pages to a true content management system. Now a product called CityDesk provides the best answer yet." (Reprinted here)
From the Flogging of Dead Horses department
Rick Chapman interviewed me again... no, I still don't think you should rewrite large software products from the ground up. Not even Outlook.
Today I'm learning ADO.NET. Am I crazy, or is this a step backwards?
Adam Fisk: Lose the Joel-Worship!
It's true. I get email from people on development teams who appear to be in some kind of big fight over something, and they are hitting each other over the head with various quotes from me, instead of thinking for themselves, and now they want me to adjudicate, as if I know the first thing about their problems or their world. I haven't yet written the article that says that if you can't think for yourself, no amount of "methodology" is going to save you.
1110 posts over 13 years. Everything I’ve ever published is right here.
There’s a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully.